Changing
the Default
Shell for a User

General
Information

Introduction

Often it is desirable to use a different shell than the standard
csh. This page will tell you where
the default shell of each user is stored, and how to change it.
Here we assume that you do not use NIS or another network service
for authentification.

Changing the Default Shell

Basic user information like its login name, home directory and
encrypted password is stored in a central database in /etc/passwd.
Here is a snapshot of a standard /etc/passwd
file:

There are users with their encrypted password set to an asterix
*, this means that the account is disabled
and the user cannot login to the system. An empty field means
that no password is installed, like in the "OutOfBox"
user and the "demos" user.

You may also have noticed that there are lots of strange users
like "daemon", "bin" etc. These are system
accounts needed by IRIX and are disabled, so nobody can login
with such an account, which often has addition permissions.

Now it should also be straight forward how to change the default
shell: You simply need to edit the last field in the corresponding
line of the user.